Heitur Pottur

 Jump in... This is my entry for Summer Joust's Frozen Fantasy category. It's simply the first idea I got almost two months ago. I build the figures and the water before my summer vacation trips in late June and finished the encircling rocks after coming back in late July. Dwarves were a natural fit for the ice fantasy category, and I wanted to make something concretely connected to the temperature. What's the contested resource in icy worlds? Warmth, of course. And where do you find warmth in cold worlds? In summers, of course, but that would have missed the point. Then I remembered Icelandic term "heitur pottur" from my 8th grade Swedish book. Ultimately, turned out that it does not mean hot springs at all, but simply refers to artificial baths. Nevertheless, it felt good fit for three dwarves swimming in hot springs. Tolkien took The Hobbit's dwarf names from the Icelandic Poetic Edda, so dwarves + Icelandic hot springs was good enough.

The first structural idea was to use droid arms as the beard of the middle figure, floating on water. This is based on my own beard experiences. I had those in light bley, so he became the elder of the group. I gave him a pipe to reflect this, and sunk most of him under the water (this meant I only had to build the head, shoulders, and kneecaps; plus tan and dark tan plates sunken under the water tiles). The pipe had a smoke twist originally, but it looked too messy with the snow and the steam so I took it off.

The second dwarf is what you might call your stereotypical fantasy dwarf. He's bold enough to have the mail shirt off, but the iron helmet stays. He's extremely grumpy and has a well-groomed beard. It's based on the design I made for Glóin in my Hobbit Dwarves project back in 2014. (I think the direction had been good). It works so much better with the flat silver 1x1 liftarms than it ever did with the old type of half-bushings! I first though to giving this dwarf a more relaxed posing, leaning the rocks with a tankard in hand. Ultimately, the stiff stature had more character.

The last dwarf has more of him visible as he's wearing nothing at all and only part of his legs is under the surface. Fortunately (?) his impressive facial hair protects the viewer from full frontal nudity. The beard is really tangled and rugged and he's really in need of a hot bath. Initially, he was descending into the pool more carefully, but I ended up with an almost astonished pose instead - the water really is hot!

 Building rocks is generally boring. Here, I utilised similar tricks to those in Vainolaista Vastaan in 2024. However, I made the rocks even more rounded, as if polished by centuries of hot waters. Although I generally prefer lighter grays, dark bley was a good fit here, as the rocks are bound to be somewhat wet due to all the steam, water and melting snow. Furthermore, I positioned the snow in a way that suggest that the hot pool has smelt the snow near by.

Photographing this was a really tricky. I ended up with a weird shot, taken extremely close with a wide lense I borrowed from my university to shoot stairwells. This makes the edges rather distorted - the edged as actually parallel to each other. You can see the distorion extremely clearly by comparing the tankards, which are identical in shape. However, this shot had two major advantages: First, it shows the expression of both the low and the high dwarves (grey and brown hair). Secondly, it feels like you are actually in the pool with the dwarves! Engaging.

I have one more Summer Joust entry, which I'll post next.

- Eero.